With his long, stringy, gray-streaked hair, sideburns, faded blue jeans, tennis shoes and tiny, round glasses, Paul Greengrass has the sort of off-kilter look of a nonconformist. So it is not surprising that the films that have thus far defined his career -- the critically acclaimed "Bloody Sunday" and "The Murder of Stephen Lawrence" among them -- have been outside the mainstream, drawn from the stuff of history with Greengrass creating the narrative as well as the visual style.

Matt Damon didn't want to make another Jason Bourne movie, and neither did director Paul Greengrass. When your leading man and star filmmaker have departed one of your most profitable series, the alternatives aren't great. But in today's Hollywood, those options do not include throwing in the towel. Opening Friday, "The Bourne Legacy"is Universal Pictures' audacious answer to its spy series quandary. Rather than ditch Damon for another actor - the case when Harrison Ford replaced Alec Baldwin in the Tom Clancy movies or repeatedly with James Bond - the studio decided to create a parallel plot with a new actor, "The Hurt Locker's" Jeremy Renner, and added a fresh director, "Michael Clayton's" Tony Gilroy.

You have to hand it to "Green Zone." Made with daring and passion, it attempts the impossible and comes remarkably close to pulling it off. So close, in fact, that the skill and audacity used, the shock and awe of this highly entertaining attempt, are more significant than the imperfect results. As created by director Paul Greengrass, screenwriter Brian Helgeland and star Matt Damon, this risk-taking endeavor uses the narrative skills and drive Greengrass honed beautifully on "The Bourne Ultimatum" and "The Bourne Supremacy" and marries them to reality-based political concerns.

When Paul Greengrass directs a thoroughly dramatic tale based on true events and Tom Hanks takes on the title role, you think you know what to expect. But just you wait - the piercingly realistic "Captain Phillips" will exceed your expectations. The story of the six days that Richard Phillips, captain of the cargo ship Maersk Alabama, spent in April 2009 first trying to avoid a gang of Somali pirates and then as their restive captive, this film does an impeccable job of creating and tightening the narrative screws.

Clint Eastwood's World War II drama "Letters From Iwo Jima" -- a recollection of the famed 1945 battle told from the Japanese perspective -- was named best movie of the year Sunday by the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. It's the second such honor for the film in less than a week -- the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures also named "Iwo Jima" the top film of the year -- and the decisive wins make it an early front-runner for the Academy Awards.

For Paul Greengrass, the journey of "Captain Phillips" took him through unfamiliar waters in which he had to make himself at home. "For some reason with this one, I took a few days to find my way," the director says. "I remember feeling I was a bit inhibited with the material. I spoke to Chris Rouse, my editor, one night and said, 'I'm worried the stuff I'm doing is a bit boring.' He said, 'Oh, I thought it was a choice!' "So the next day I thought, 'We're going to go for it now,' and I started to really let rip. Tom came up to me a few hours later, 'That's more like it!

Movie crews can number as many as 300 people. And yet amid all that hubbub, film directors can craft the most personal moments: Joaquin Phoenix confessing his love for an operating system in "Her"; Robert Redford facing his mortality in "All Is Lost"; James Gandolfini realizing he's too old to have his heart broken again in "Enough Said. " In the fifth annual Directors Panel, six of the year's most distinguished filmmakers discuss how they carve intimacy out of chaos, what it feels like sitting across from actors dying in auditions and what they wish they had learned before they started making movies.

It's a film genre about as healthy as American auto-making -- the Middle East war movie. But if any director-actor pairing might be able to make an Iraq film a commercial film, Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon may be it. Loosely adapted by screenwriter Brian Helgeland ("L.A. Confidential") from the nonfiction bestseller "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone," Greengrass' "Green Zone" aspires to be less didactic discourse than duck-and-cover adventure.